Cuil not a google killer yet

With hours of being launched Monday, Cuil - a new search engine created by former top Google engineers - was already being touted in the blogosphere as the next Google killer. But unless Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) can develop an ad platform to rival Google’s, Cuil will have a difficult time challenging the search giant.

The comparisons to Google were inevitable. Cuil was founded by several lead engineers from Google, including Anna Patterson, chief architect of the company’sTeraGoogle search index. Cuil also claims its search algorithm scans through 120 billion web pages - three times the number that Google sifts through. And Cuil’s spare start page is reminiscent of Google’s minimalist home page.

The launch of Cuil certainly raised eyebrows at Google. Though the company would not comment on Cuil’s launch, Google’s web search team stuck it to the small search startup on Monday with a blog post that begins, “We knew the web was big…We’ve known it for a long time.”

“It’s a new kind of technology and platform that is going to unseat a company like Google - not a company that‚s trying to beat them at their own game,” says Scott Kessler, Standard & Poor’s Internet analyst.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft have been trying [...]

8000000 million unregistered SIMs blocked

The step taken by Standing Committee of Senate on Interior to curb unregistered Subscriber Identity Modules (SIMs) Card culture has resulted in blockage of eight million unidentified connections.

While addressing a press conference, he said that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of five mobile companies operating in the country had held a meeting with him regarding the actions taken by their firms. Talha said that the committee held 31 meetings to address the issue.

"I have called an urgent meeting of the committee on August 7 to formulate future strategy," he added.

He said that the CEOs had informed him that their business was adversely affected by the action taken by the committee. The CEO's also handed over the CDs of 8 million unregistered SIMs for verification, he added. The CDs had been handed over to law enforcing agencies, he further said.

The chairman said that since the start of mobile services in the country, 18 years ago, SIMs were issued without any verification and documentation, which played a major role to vitiate the law and order situation in the country.

Out of these 8 million unregistered SIMs, 1.2 million had been reissued after proper verification and documentation. Whereas, 0.8 million blocked SIMs were given a dead line of July 25 for verifications, he added. He said that in order to find the culprits behind the distribution of unregistered SIMs, special teams raided across the country.

Talha said that the mobile companies were given a time frame till July 31 to complete their work in this respect. "Afterwards, from August 1, we will launch a crackdown against them," he warned. He said that after completing this task the committee would take action against the dilapidated condition of jails in the country.

MIcrosoft to bring LiveSearch to Facebook

Microsoft Corporation unveiled plans to weave Live Search into the Facebook social networking site, widening the scope of the two companies' nearly two-year-old advertising relationship.

Set to launch in the fall, the agreement will let users conduct Web searches from within Facebook and will also include Microsoft's paid search advertising, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a keynote speech at Microsoft's annual financial analyst meeting.

"We will be providing an API to Facebook where they will create a rich search experience, including a Web search for the Facebook users," Ballmer told analysts. "So we're excited about even using that as an opportunity to further extend the Live Search reach."

Facebook and Microsoft first hooked up in 2006 when the two firms announced a strategic partnership that made Microsoft the sole provider of banner ads on Facebook's U.S. site, a deal that's slated to run until 2011. In October, Microsoft acquired a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million, in a deal that pegged Facebook's valuation at a staggering $15 billion.

Microsoft, a distant third to Google and Yahoo in search, has been getting creative in its quest to gain search market share and compete more effectively with its more established foes.

In May, Microsoft announced Live Search Cashback, a program in which users receive ad-funded rebates each time they buy a product from one of the software giant's 700+ merchant partners, a list that includes eBay, Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears, and Zappos.com.

Of course, Microsoft would love to buy Yahoo and has been attempting to acquire search player No. 2 for months, but Microsoft executives at the financial analysts meeting indicated that a deal involving Microsoft buying the entire company is extremely unlikely at this point.

Google launches Knol, the Wikipedia alternative

The Search Giant has launched a program known as Knol (knowledge) that is alternative to wikipedia. The basic reason of developing this so-called knowledge based platform is to incorporate the Google AdSense into different articles, with a revenue share between the authors of particular topic.

In this platform authors will have kind of ownership in the way that, they can moderate their articles by acting as gatekeepers to any changes made by other users outside the creator group. More than one knol can be created on a subject but the rating on the article would define it's authenticity and quality.

As of now, it seems to be a good system. A good article would be a popular article, and a popular article would be more likely to get AD revenue. It would be an interesting social experiment to see who will fly among Wikipedia - where social contribution is encouraged or Knol - where there is a capalitism to the mix.

Facebook gets a change

Facebook today released a new, cleaner and simpler design, along with the opportunity for users to preview and test the next-generation features and functionality. The company is inviting people to use the new design and try out the improved features by navigating back and forth between the new and current versions of the site. Access to the new design will be limited at first and gradually become available to all of Facebook's more than 80 million users over the coming days. The company has been developing the new design since early this year. Over the past six months, more than 100,000 Facebook users offered constructive suggestions on the layout and features, many of which were included in the final version.

"We've made the changes rolling out today in order to highlight the most recent and relevant information that users value, give users even more control and ownership over their profiles and simplify the user experience," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "Facebook's new design makes it a lot easier for users to share information, and we encourage them to check it out."

Screenshot: Latest facebook design

Windows Live for Windows Mobile

The latest bits for Windows Live Client for your Windows Mobile are available for download. To get yours now, point your mobile browser to http://wl.windowsmobile.com

If you have Windows Live already installed on your device, you will need to uninstall it first. To do that, go to Settings->Remove Programs, select Windows Live entry from the list (if any) and click Remove. If you don’t find Windows Live on the list, then you are good to go.

With Windows Live client you will be able to:

• Synchronize Live contacts with your contacts on the device
• Synchronize your Live email (msn, hotmail, live)
• View graphics, web links and contact photos in emails
• Respond to emails with voice recordings
• Upload photos to your Windows Live Spaces

Go ahead, give it a try and let Windows Mobile Team know what you think!

Quote with QuotesDaddy.com

"Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes", said, QuotesDaddy

Everyone is proficient in something, whether it's negotiation, gaming, poker or dating, people have some sort of wisdom, humor or views that can be shared around the globe.

QuotesDaddy.com is now offering users the ability to learn and become an author or an expert on just about any topic by writing their own words of wisdom, insights and sensible remarks as quotes to this website.

QuotesDaddy was initially launched as the largest online library of famous quotes, featuring over 1,000,000 quotes from different well known personalities throughout history, two months back. Now, they have opened their site for all the users to sign up and submit their own quotes. These user generated quotes are the reason to infuse this site with fresh ideas and new content.

Different kinds of quotes like life quotes, death quotes, funny quotes, love quoites can be found at QuotesDaddy.com and along with that, you can get your own QuotesDaddy widget for your site, which includes the ability to choose what type of quotes you'd like to display and you can easily use a QuotesDaddy quote as a signature of your gmail account.

Users are now able to create an author page where they can share their links to their website, blogs, biography and share their favorite quotes. This may help users to become experts and known individuals in their own domain of expertise. Users can also create their own favorite lists of quotes from these new user quotations along with the quotes from famous personalities like Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare.

So next time you feel the need for a bit of inspiration or advice, check out QuotesDaddy.com.

Toshiba unveils first cell-processor based laptop

Toshiba announced a new laptop with a Cell CPU; a technology known as PS3 processing technology among consumers, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony and IBM.

Toshiba's new Qosmio G55-Q802 is a windows vista based system got Core 2 Duo on board. According to Toshiba, this very architecture of processor call its Quad Core HD Processor. It is designed as a multimedia entertainment unit rather than hard-core gaming.

Upcontrol, Transcoding, Video Indexing, and Gesture Control are the unique features of the Qosmio. DVD Conversion or HD reduction is done gently in an optimized time.

Video Indexing refers to the catalog video content by images present on screen. With the help of hand gestures, users can control the Powepoint presentations, DVDs, CDs and the webcam detects motion up to ten feet away and issues commands according to the movement it sees.

Following is its configuration

• 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 3 MB L2 Cache
• 4G DDR2
• 250GB SATA Drives
• 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9600M
• 64-bit Vista by default but can be configured in 32-bit

LG announces Chocolate 3 Music Phone

Perhaps in an effort to steal some of Apple's iPhone thunder this week, LG today announced its own new music phone, the Chocolate 3 for Verizon Wireless. The newest addition to the company's series of Chocolate handsets is compatible with the Rhapsody's subscription music service.

Rhapsody subscribers will be able to fill up the phone's memory with plenty of tunes from the service's catalog of more than five million tracks. The flip phone also supports standard MP3, WMA, and unprotected AAC file formats. To share your music in the car or at parties, the Chocolate features an FM receiver plus a set of stereo speakers. Data can be stored on a microSD memory card, and the device's slot accepts cards up to 8GB in capacity.

The Chocolate 3 also has a 2-megapixel camera, and is compatible with Verizon's V Cast mobile video service. Charging and data transfers are conveniently carried out via the phone's mini USB port. The Chocolate 3 will be available on Sunday for $179.99 with purchase of a two-year Verizon Wireless contract. Be sure to check back soon for our full review of this new music phone.

via PC Mag

Seagate to roll out 1.5TB hard drives

One terabyte hard drives still cramping your decadent data storage lifestyle? You don't have to cry on that. The storage firm is rolling out 1.5TB HDDs next month. This new and improved Barracuda 7200.11 will be using four platters to cram the scale-tipping new raw capacity into an eleventh generation of its flagship drive. Seagate points out its the single largest hard drive capacity bump in the last 5 decades.

As the name suggests, the HDD spins at 7,200RPM. The 3Gb/s SATA I interface has a sustained data rate of up to 120MB/s.

Read the full story at The Reg

Social Search by Sightix

Today, users are interested in searching for the social entities that created the best means of engaging them. But the problem is with social networking sites, how can they able to provide the ability to return relevant search results for their users? Google, The Search Giant is no doubt great for searching the pages but still unable to search inside a social network.

Sightix is the next step in the evolution of search. It provides the appropriate and focused results based on the user’s social circle that includes his friends and relationships. Sightix basically searches the content of everyone you are connected with, and rank results gleaned from each user based on the strength of their connection to you.

“This is both a huge asset as well as a management challenge. For startups the fact that people are given the creative freedom and flexibility in the process means they aren’t just working for the job, they are working to prove their inputs and opinions as being right…” Said, Ari Gottesmann, Sightix’s VP of Business Development.

With Sightix Social Search, you would be able to empower your search capabilities with a unique ranking based on social relevancy and an interactive social map to better understand interpersonal relationships and best street of approach. Current search engines do not consider an identity of the user and that’s why everybody gets the same results.

According to the Gottesmann, Google’s search algorithm is flawed while Slightix’s algorithm takes an identity of user, his friends and connections when providing him with search results. For example, if you’re searching for a nightclub, the clubs your friends talk about will get a higher relevance than your friends of friends. It's much more likely that this ranking will yield results that work for you than searching a general engine that doesn't give an extra weight to your friends' recommendations.

Currently, the company is focusing on smaller networks because of its less development process time. It's doubtful that this technology will work when users are looking for something completely unknown to their networks, but I bet they would be amazed to find how much they can infer from their extended social circle with a tool like Sightix.

Shin1 deal is a good one to get it first and Gottesmann is interested on getting this service embedded in the large upcoming social networks.

Involver brings interactive video widget for advertisements

Most of the people is now sick of static ads and that’s why they are reeling people in videos, feeds, and other integrated ways. Hence, replacing those sick ads with interactive ones. Involver actually replaces the banner ads with an interactive video widget that can be fully customized by the brand.

Involver is one of the start points for any marketer planning to create a video campaign for social networks. Involver allows you to build, launch promote, manage and monitor video campaigns that reach millions of social networking users with the greatest opportunity to convert viewers into customers.

Involver owns easy-to-use campaign builder. It contains menu buttons that can be added to the video, which appear at the top and the bottom of the clip. Involver takes advantage of the viral sharing capabilities as it’s video ad is powered by Gigya.

You always have an option to install different kind of add-ons like an email registration window (collect email addresses for your outgoing newsletter), RSS feeds, petitions, donate buttons, a shopping cart etcetera that would help you in making some interactive ads.

Now, seeing an ad you’re interested in and not clicking on it because you don’t want to interrupt is the worst part of these interactive ads. But the core concept that Involver is promoting here is the fact that brands can skip dynamically landing pages and just close the deal, directly from the video widget. One more interesting thing about these type of ads is that it will call for a shift according to the ad revenues that are distributed amongst brands, networks, and site publishers.

Involver also has a dashboard where brands keep track of their campaigns which is also quite essential for reporting purposes. As the brands' advertisements on the Web become more divergent, the reporting of campaigns will become more important. It would definitely have the great impact on the types of ad networks that succeed, without caring about the front-end technology.

Evri: Search Less - Understand More

Evri, the site which has been launched in a private beta last week uses semantic engine in order to help users discover related information. Evri is not a search engine in fact it helps you in finding related information by analyzing the text to determine relationships between specific terms.

In its early stages, Evri will only sort out with a limited set of results and possible search terms, based on what it considers to be the most popular terms and people. For example, a search for Bill Gates would yield a visual graph liking him to the Microsoft Corporation, his wife, children and other colleagues, along with the concise summary of his background. This approach of starting with only the most popular terms is evocative of Mohalo. Unlike the human-powered search engine Mohalo, Evri completely relies on its algorithms to create connections between people, products, events etcetera.

“Evri helps make sense of information by organizing knowledge on the Web based on its semantic meaning”, said Neil Roseman, CEO of Evri.

Evri can discriminate between grammatical objects such as subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections.

Evri is entering into an era of competition with a semantic search market, especially Powerset and Hakia. Though, they don’t focus much on the relationships between objects but on providing highly organized results for a given term.

Evri is also seeking talented and energetic innovators to help them fundamentally change the way people find and interact with the information on the web. You can also sign up for the invites to Beta Preview of Evri on their homepage and feel the difference.

Swurl to bring social networks together

If you’ve ever used a microblogging tool like Tumblr then Swurl will not be alien for you. Swurl is a platform that automatically brings all of your social networking activities together into a blog format. Perhaps, its best feature is the timeline view, that presents all your desired contents in an organized calendar view.

Besides the timeline view, Swurl also allows you to customize your activities in a blog-type format. If you don’t want to send the URL to your FriendFeed page to your classmate, then you may send her to a Swurl page instead.

The basic idea behind Swurl’s development is to centralize the conversation instead of having it scattered about among your different networks. Swurl currently supports the following:

Once you setup these services, they will be aggregated for you on the main page. All kinds of visual treats like a cool slideshow viewer, elegant captions on your photos, flash audio player etc can be found inside of each item. Another great feature is the way that commenting and discussion is conveniently integrated into the main page.

There are few areas in which Swurl needs to improve. One of them is viewing your friends’ activities. You probably won’t use it unless it is very casual. But over all, the look and feel of the site is rewarding and extremely instinctive. Swurl’s aggregation of relationships from all networks encourages the network growth, but doesn’t force you to work inside its own barriers.

Google and Yahoo to index flash files content

Nothing can be hidden from search engines. Be it content in any of your favourite picture or the text inside the Adobe's flash (.swf) file.

As of today, the matter inside the SWF files are still invisible to search engines but due to Adobe's joint effort with Yahoo and Google, pictures, hyperlinks, audios and videos of Adobe's Flash File Format (.SWF) will be indexed by their Search Engines.

"End users will be getting more accurate search results because there's a lot of information in SWF files that will now befully indexed, including more information in Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)," said Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, Platform BU

Adobe representatives claimed that crawling of data inside Flash Files is already being done at Google but no shipment date of improved search has been announced yet from Yahoo!